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"Canada is training too few workers — from plumbers to PhDs — for today's
smart economy and, unless we set a national plan for higher education,
other countries are going to "eat our lunch," warns a federal report
released in December 2006.
Without a coast-to-coast blueprint for higher learning with sharp goals
for quality, affordability and access, Canada will be left behind by
economies on nearly every other continent, says this country's first
national overview of post-secondary education, by the Canadian Council on
Learning, an independent research body created this year.
"When a hockey team is falling in the standings, you need to know what to
fix — the goaltending? Checking? Forwards? We need to start tracking
post-secondary education on a national level so we can figure out what
needs to be done to improve," said council president Paul Cappon.
While the United States, the , Australia
and the
European Union have been busy setting targets for better post-secondary
funding, graduation rates, class size, library holdings and teaching
credentials, Cappon says Canada
has
neglected to set any national vision for post-secondary education and is
now "out of sync with 21st-century reality.
"The status quo is not an option; we produce fewer PhDs than the average
among countries in the OECD (Organization for Economic Co-operation and
Development) and we're near the bottom for producing graduates in science
and engineering," he said in an interview.
While 70 per cent of new jobs are expected to require some level of higher
learning, he noted roughly 44 per cent of Canadians have this much formal
schooling.
The writing is on the wall for policy makers when it comes to
post-secondary education for people living in Canada. More must be done to
ensure that our children are receiving adequate training that will equip
them for work in the 21st century.
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